


Entertained by Angels Unawares

by Big_Edies_Sun_Hat



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Bickering, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Historical, Humor, M/M, Pre-Relationship, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 19:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19775290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Big_Edies_Sun_Hat/pseuds/Big_Edies_Sun_Hat
Summary: A series of vignettes on the theme of forgetting, being forgotten, and remembering. Included: Aziraphale destroys minds; Crowley accidentally invents Bitcoin; Aziraphale loses his appetite; a T-shirt is purchased.{“I distinctly remember you telling me that my entire wardrobeoughtto be set on fire—”“Oh, come on, I was drunk—”“—so I supposeyou’repleased about it, in any case—”“—andI told you I’d get you a new one,” said Crowley.)





	Entertained by Angels Unawares

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of these scenes are riffs on scenes that happened in Discworld novels (a thief spotting Angua's transformation; Cohen managing to buy an apple). I didn't plan it that way, but I liked it. 
> 
> This is an elaborate series of headcanons strung together on a theme, and I hope you enjoy it.

When children live in terrible homes, one of the many, many things they need is a place to escape, for a day or a night or an afternoon. They need someone to care for them, to look after them, but in the absence of that—or even in the sudden and miraculous presence of it—they need somewhere to be alone.

There was, for some two hundred years, a particular bookshop in Soho that was extremely good at being lost in. It had the sort of proprietor that preferred not to notice customers, which was excellent if you were only pretending to be one. A quiet, careful young girl could very easily snake into the towering stacks and tuck herself in a pile of clothbound literary biographies from the 1970s, where no one would look for her, or for anything. A boy could always find a chair against the wall in the art folio section, and although it might not be comfortable, it would never be disturbed.

Very occasionally, the proprietor would find a child or a teenager folded up in the stacks, and look at them: only a look, but _definitely_ that. _I know all about it_ , the look seemed to say; _just be out by closing_. And then he would nod and pass on, as if the child worked there too. The child would sigh with relief: real relief, for one moment in their life.

Not one of the children that lost themselves in the stacks of that bookshop were ever lost. All of them found a foothold out of the lives they were born to. Some found good trades; some took degrees; some practiced law or medicine. Not all of them became well off—some of them worked in lonely places, with little reward—and not all of them had children of their own. But all of them became the adults they had badly needed when they were young.

In years to come, when these people wrote memoirs, or gave speeches to classes of young people, or simply told their stories to their own families, every single one of them failed to mention that bookshop. They spoke of how much peace books had given them, and some of them even mentioned hiding in a bookshop, but not one of them could have said which one it was or who kept it. Two or three of them were thoughtful enough to wonder about this, to regret that they didn’t remember such a thing, but none of them did, or could.

Mr. Fell had decided it was best that way.

——

A.Z. Fell & Co. had occasional trouble with robbers, especially since anyone who watched it could see that it was only ever staffed by one middle-aged shopkeeper who didn’t seem as if he had ever lifted anything heavier than a dictionary. Every so often, Aziraphale would find himself outside his door with a knife (at best) pressed to his throat, flanked by one or two young men who demanded to be shown the safe.

At such times, Aziraphale did exactly what he did when he was confronted with the sort of people who insisted on buying his shop, which was to invite these gentlemen in. And, to their own surprise and horror, they would accept. They would set down their knives or guns or garrotes, and they would come inside.

Twenty minutes or so later, they would leave. They would go to whatever bedsit or hallway they slept in, gather their things, and leave that place, too. Where they went after that was never simple for them to figure out, but not one of them went back to the way they had been living just an hour beforehand.

Each one of them became law-abiding men. This did not make them pleasant men, necessarily, or easy to be around, or easy to be. Some of them even turned themselves in, confessed to old crimes, served in prison. Many joined gloomy and missionary churches. But all of them found their way, eventually, to the straight and narrow. If there was anyone who asked such a man why he had changed his ways, he would look blank, then say something like, “Sick of it, that’s all, sick to death of it.”

And he would believe himself as he said this. He would not remember the book shop. He would not remember the kindly man who had given him biscuits and a cup of strong tea that he was physically incapable of refusing. He would not remember how that man told him, somehow _inside_ himself, about the true nature of Hell, the isolation of the soul from all light. He would not remember the thousand eyes. But he would occasionally be gripped by unaccountable existential dread at the sight of custard creams.

Crowley was genuinely aghast when, around about 1979, Aziraphale explained exactly how he kept his shop safe.

“You do that? You bloody do _that_? The worst I ever did was kill a man!”

Aziraphale was equally aghast.

“Kill him? For trying to rob you?”

“Well, it didn’t ruin his life,” said Crowley. “I just stopped his lower brain functions. He didn’t feel anything. I didn’t send him to _church_ for the rest of his days.”

“Neither have I. I simply provide a valuable shift in perspective. I don’t enforce these things; I’m not _avenging_. What do you take me for?”

Crowley muttered an answer to this.

“Excuse me?”

“Forget it,” he said hastily.

——

The loneliness of immortal beings is a staple of a certain kind of fiction. Crowley, of course, did not read very much, so he did not know that there were humans who understood just this. He attracted the sort of large-eyed young women and men who longed to understand _him_ in particular, but he did not attempt to make any use of them for that reason. This was not really a kindness; he was thinking of himself. He did not go in for that kind of trouble, which certainly destroyed souls but was a terrible mess and took a lot of work, which, in general, he was allergic to. Instead, he silently directed the minds of his admirers to more reliable objects of affection, such as Lord Byron.

It must be said that Aziraphale did not exactly have a problem with a surplus of humans who longed to understand him, young or otherwise. But people liked him. They feared or wanted Crowley, but they _liked_ Aziraphale. When he smiled, when something made him light up with real joy, anyone nearby was simply and briefly happier. No one knew why this was, or even that it was. All other people knew was that it was delightful to talk to this odd and absent-minded little man.

Often, they found themselves telling him things that they thought he was too silly or sheltered to understand. Sometimes this was true. Sometimes it wasn’t. Whatever it was, he remembered it, and carefully made sure that his new friends had forgotten who they’d spoken to.

Neither of the two of them saw a great deal more of the people they fascinated. Their human friends forgot them, either through death or circumstances or simply because they had, with all gentleness, been made to forget.

Aziraphale, of course, _did_ read, in quantities only achievable by someone who never slept, and eventually he got around to reading an author who spoke of the loneliness of immortality in a way that truly touched him. He wished he hadn’t. It made him wretched. What could he do? Who could he tell? There was no one he could discuss the book with, not even Crowley. He would never understand. Or worse, what he would understand was—

And anyway, the book was by Anne Rice. There was no one in existence he could tell about _that_.

——

In his latter two centuries, Crowley no longer paid his bills. What he did instead was to cause the requisite banks or computer systems to believe that their bills had been paid.

He did not do this to the kind of freelancers who required cash on the barrelhead. For them, he always produced money, sometimes quite literally. And he did not do this to small businesses, unless he knew something in particular about how they treated their counter staff. But by the twenty-first century, there were tens of thousands of pounds, traded many times over, that were literally _fiat_ currency—Crowley had said “Let there be money,” and there was.

This had not done any appreciable harm, at least not according to Crowley. Aziraphale, however, disapproved.

“You do the very same thing,” Crowley pointed out. “I’ve _seen_ you do it. Besides, has your place paid for itself since—I don’t know—1996?”

Aziraphale rubbed his temples in a way that suggested that it hadn’t. He said,

“It’s the principle of the thing. There are ways and ways of repayment. Sometimes, it so happens that I have creditors who— _forget_ to keep certain invoices, because their books are balanced anyway—but I always return value for money. Or more so. The gentleman who sold me this desk, for example. He was suffering from an incipient glioblastoma. Of course, he knew nothing about it, but I took a hard look at him and there it was. You’d have seen it yourself, if you tried.”

“Suffering—you, uh, put it in his mind to go to the doctor?” said Crowley, who had not the slightest idea what _glioblastoma_ meant.

“Oh, no. There’d be nothing they could do for him, not even today. It’s the worst kind of brain tumor. But, of course,” said Aziraphale, now visibly pleased with himself, “once I’d taken a good look at him, he didn’t have one.”

“Ah,” said Crowley.

“I’d have done it anyway, of course,” he added quickly. “If I’d happened to take enough of a look to see.”

“Of course you would,” said Crowley, pushing up his glasses to hide his eyes.

“But the occasional cure comes under the heading of general benevolence, and doesn’t cause extra paperwork for me, and _certainly_ not for them. Thus debts are paid and repaid. It’s not at all the same thing as ‘stiffing’ the American Express Company,” said Aziraphale, who somehow managed to indicate the presence of direct quotation marks when he used slang. “ _Or_ when you taught those young men to build the computing machines to ‘mine coins’ out of what? Kilobytes? The luminiferous aether? Tell me, how does that work?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Crowley wretchedly. “I didn’t _teach_ anyone anything. I just had coffee with some bloke out in California, talked about money for a bit. I don’t even remember his face.”

——

It was easy for Crowley to make humans forget him. The real trick was to make Hell forget him. He eventually got quite good at this, and pulled it off for decades at a time. Sometimes he simply wanted to sleep, or to sulk, or both. Sometimes he wanted to travel. Specifically, he wanted to travel outside what Aziraphale often called the “remit,” the battleground nations of Heaven and Hell. The space outside the battlegrounds grew smaller every few years, sometimes by inches, sometimes by whole countries. Crowley had come to notice that those countries were not much happier for the experience.

A small grass snake could slip into baggage and travel with caravans or ships unmolested, especially if it didn’t need to breathe or eat. It _would_ need to move very fast when it was found, but that was never a problem. The screaming always died down after a few minutes. This was never a very comfortable trip, but no one asked questions on the other end.

It was no use asking the angel to come with him to places like this. He did not travel well. He loved to, of course, but he was incapable of doing it without being noticed, and often being shouted at by locals. Anyway, he _liked_ his work; he must do, anyway. He always got short with Crowley when Crowley asked him to leave things be for more than a day or so. If Crowley had asked Aziraphale to knock off and come see Beijing, he would never understand. Or worse, what he would understand was—

The sum of it was that Crowley had no one to share mooncakes with—or dosas, or tamales, or whatever it was they had where he was going. But he had them anyway, just so he could remember what the food was like, and talk about it later.

——

The fourteenth century had been unpleasant in every possible way—the constant wars, the unchecked deaths, the wretched music, the time that Crowley, for reasons he never quite understood, was assigned to convince the King of France that he was made of glass. It was all so dire that, for many years in a row, Aziraphale forgot to eat.

He was, of course, never actually hungry, but it was equally accurate to say that he was never _not_ hungry. There and then, though, he truly had no interest in food or drink. When he knew that there was hardly anything for anyone to eat, he ate none of it. It was true that he often seemed to be several decades behind events, but then, several decades before that had been the Great Famine.

Crowley only saw him once that century, sometime around 1355, passing for a priest in Avignon. He was well-dressed but gray-faced and drawn, and pretended to be in a hurry. It was all Crowley could do to drag him over to a bench in a miserable tavern and make him take a mug of small ale, which, by the time he handed it over, had become strong porter.

“You look important,” he said. “ _And_ you look terrible.”

“It’s the tonsure, isn’t it,” said Aziraphale. This was clearly a sore point.

“No, I meant—What do they have you doing here, anyway?”

Aziraphale looked delighted to have been asked.

“ _Well_ ,” he said, and began to explain. Crowley braced himself.

His assignment had to do with influencing an ecumenical dispute over the _computus_ , the calculation of Easter. Aziraphale explained at length, with a good deal of gesturing, drawing lunar charts in the air, clean blue lines that only the two of them could see. Crowley watched carefully. He understood absolutely none of it, and didn’t much care to, but Aziraphale clearly enjoyed talking about it, and he didn’t seem to be enjoying much else.

Once he was finished, Crowley said,

“So, what is it?”

“What is what?”

“The actual date of Easter. You remember, of course. We were in town at the time. I’m sure you’ve told them. All about watching Him rise into glory on the third day after—what was it, now?”

Aziraphale winced.

“That’s in extremely bad taste. Even for you.”

Crowley made a sort of sideways gesture that indicated that he was, of course, just asking.

“Those poor women,” said Aziraphale, staring into the distance. “They were so certain.”

Crowley continued to say nothing, in an expansive sort of way.

“In any case, that’s not the point. The point is to maintain control of doctrine in order to avoid schism in the Church, or else, should schism prove inevitable, to, er, preserve the balance of powers in …”

He trailed off.

“You’ve forgotten what the point is?” said Crowley

“No. It’s just … I was in at the Death, you know,” said Aziraphale suddenly. “The plague. Where were you?”

“Here and there,” said Crowley carefully. He realized Aziraphale had taken a strong, quick drink on an empty stomach.

“I helped everyone I could,” he said, staring at his mug. “Until I couldn’t. I wasn’t let to, any more. Because of the _balance_ of … And people lay in the streets. They lay there for days and I couldn’t …”

Crowley hissed. He hadn’t meant to. He meant to say _shhh_ , which, he had gathered, was a comforting thing to hear. He wasn’t called on to do a lot of comforting. It didn’t seem to work, as such, but at least it got Aziraphale’s attention.

“You’re tempting me, aren’t you?”

“What? No more than usual.”

“Yes, you are. You _do_ this. You’re leading me to question my faith and I _wish_ you wouldn’t,” said Aziraphale plaintively, and rubbed his forehead. “I’m … I don’t seem to be able to concentrate so well these days.”

“Do you sleep?” said Crowley. “You should try it. Amazing stuff.”

“You know,” said Aziraphale, “I tried once, but I’ve forgotten how.”

——

At the time of the accidental destruction of A.Z. Fell & Co., Aziraphale’s cabinets contained something like twenty-five unpublished monographs, either typewritten or printed on a daisy-wheel printer. All of them were thorough, carefully endnoted, and extremely boring.

They would not have been boring at all to their intended audiences, who in each case consisted of several dozen scholars worldwide, at best. To anyone who was not already invested in, for example, a typology of makers’ marks used in British silver during the eighteenth century, or a concordance of Akkadian proper-noun usage in the Amarna Letters, they were of negative interest.

That was what Aziraphale had been doing with his evenings instead of sleeping. He reviewed the books he would not sell, and he wrote about what he found there.

“I used to publish,” he complained. “Not under my name, of course, and never for money; those journals never had any. But the game’s changed. They want to be _paid_ money, can you imagine, and they want to confirm one’s credentials, which are, in a sense, impeccable, but as you can imagine, are difficult to prove through the mail. Particularly through electronic mail. So my work has rather kept piling up.”

“So what do you keep doing it for?” said Crowley, from the sofa, where he had bent himself into an odd angle in order to hang his head backwards off the arm while he played a small, beeping game on his tiny gray phone.

“You don’t understand.”

“Of course not,” said Crowley. “’S why I asked.”

“People will forget what I have here,” said Aziraphale, almost to himself.

“Thought you liked it that way.”

“Well. Yes. I always have. But—they’ll forget what _they_ have here. I mean, the books are mine, obviously,” said Aziraphale, who had always been very clear upon that subject. “But I am increasingly concerned that, assuming _arguendo_ that cultural patrimony belongs in some sense to the wider world, then being in possession of a singular collection of books and manuscripts means that you don’t seem to know this, Crowley, but I _can_ see when you roll your eyes at me from this distance, the glasses aren’t _that_ dark—”

That had been in 2008, shortly before they knew for certain when the world was going to end.

——

And the world did, in fact, end. All of the pieces were put back together afterwards, in more or less the same order, but that world was over nonetheless.

——

What do you remember when the world has burned? What do you take hold of, except what you always have?

——

Aziraphale understood what the scrap meant. He’d seen it almost as soon as he’d caught it. And he’d begun explaining it to Crowley as soon as the door of his apartment shut behind them.

“Are you sure?” said Crowley. “Are you certain? You’re not good at cunning, angel. We’ve established this.”

“This isn’t cunning. This is exegesis. Which I _am_ very good at, and I won’t hear otherwise.”

“Exegesis,” said Crowley.

“Close reading. The same close reading I gave to the entirety of the _Prophecies_ , which—”

“Right, right, right,” said Crowley. “You _are_ good at that.”

There were two strange things happening now: first, Crowley had just given him a compliment without any backbiting in it, and second, Crowley, the architect of original sin, the tempter in the wilderness, was visibly squirming with embarrassment.

“Well,” he said, “that’s sorted, isn’t it. We can do that. We can absolutely do that. Not a problem. We’ll just … ”

“How does one—”

“Ah, right, you don’t change forms a lot, do you? What about your thousand eyes, anyway?”

“Unlikely to help in this situation, really,” said Aziraphale.

The two of them were having enough trouble with their eyes as it was. Neither had been quite able to look straight at the other since the door shut.

It was distinctly hot in the apartment, and surprisingly humid. This might have been for the benefit of the plants that towered against the far wall, or it might have been for the benefit of Crowley, who never seemed to be warm enough. Aziraphale felt oddly afraid to take off his jacket.

“We should,” he said, “I mean, I suppose we should practice.”

“Not without a drink, I’m not,” said Crowley, instantly decisive. “Not going another single second without a drink. What are you having?”

“Um,” said Aziraphale. “Something cold, I should think.”

——

After two glasses of champagne,[*] they forgot not to look at each other.

They began to sort out the plan in the way that they began to sort everything out, which was by arguing about something that had happened years before.

“I distinctly remember you telling me that my entire wardrobe _ought_ to be set on fire—”

“Oh, come on, I was drunk—”

“—so I suppose _you’re_ pleased about it, in any case—”

“— _and_ I told you I’d get you a new one,” said Crowley.

“Yes, well,” said Aziraphale. “But what you have to understand now is how this clothing works.”

“I refuse to understand how your clothing works,” said Crowley.

“Will you _stop_ this is _important_. When was the last time you bought actual clothes? And put them on with your hands? You just arrange to appear in things. Look, when was the last time you wore a bow tie? And _tied_ it?”

Crowley answered this question entirely with his eyebrows.

“Right. Then you’d better know how to act comfortable in one. If you don’t, if you fidget, if you can’t fix it correctly, it could be a tell. See here. I’ll show you how it works—”

He had already thrown off his tie and jacket because of the heat. Now he took up his bow tie and retied it around his neck, with the mirror-free certainty of decades of practice.

“Look. See? And the end goes under—there.”

He untied it again.

“Now you try.”

What Aziraphale had meant was for Crowley to take the tie off him and try it on himself. This was a very simple and uninteresting set of movements. Possibly it was even what Crowley thought he was going to do.

But what he _did_ do was to reach out for Aziraphale and put his hand on his neck, his palm open, his thumb against the line of his throat; and then everything was sudden and still and silent, and no one was breathing; and the world had changed again.

Crowley reached up with his other hand, and threw the tie away; and then, for five minutes or ten or possibly an hour, they forgot everything.

——

Strangely enough, it was much easier to concentrate on the plan after that.

——

Eventually, Aziraphale remembered how to sleep again.

It was not enough simply to be comfortable, or even to be exhausted. It meant trusting the world to spin without your help for an hour, or eight, or twelve. This was not something he had ever thought of doing. It was, in fact, the complete opposite of the task that he had been given, back in the morning of the world. But that world had ended, and now, here was this one.

Crowley was a terrible creature to sleep with. He wound close and he clung with his long arms and legs; then he pushed away and tossed and kicked during the night; then he was close and clinging again. There was somehow far too much of him for comfort. But he was there—undeniably, entirely and always there. And for no better reason than that, Aziraphale could let the world spin on without him.

——

There was, shortly thereafter, a new plan.

——

“I could’ve given you a whole planet, and you want bloody Eastbourne.”

“Well, not as _such_. Anyway, I should think you’d find it less trouble, on the whole,” said Aziraphale mildly.

“Nnngh.” Crowley was angled almost square on the sofa, staring at his iPhone. “What d’ you think I’m even going to _do_ there? There’s no culture, there’s no —”

“You needn’t give up your flat, if you’d rather. We could plan to visit—”

“No, no, no. Wherever you’d like,” said Crowley, very quickly and very casually, not looking away from his phone. It was open to a real estate app.

“Expensive place,” he said. “Costs a lot to look at water anymore.”

Aziraphale told him, without looking up from his own papers, what the shop and the flat above would currently fetch on the open market. Crowley swore.

“Before that, of course, the business will be wound up and the inventory realized, which could clear over two hundred thousand—”

Crowley looked up at him with wonder.

“Inventory realized. You mean selling the books,” he said. “Selling the books! You’re _serious_.”

“Well, not _all_ of them,” said Aziraphale. “But, um. Yes.”

He looked miserable. Crowley studied him for a long moment.

“What’s this about?” he said. “What’s it really about? What’s the plan?”

——

Several months later, the inhabitants of a certain well-appointed rural neighborhood in East Sussex, the kind of place that would be described as “tony” or “leafy” if anyone had been murdered there, had new neighbors.

The ones who noticed them assumed that it was a trophy marriage—if it was that—and that the scrawny one in black was there to spend the money of the older white-haired gentleman. But then that gentleman would introduce the two of them, and it didn’t seem that way. It didn’t seem quite like anything that had ever happened before.

Mr. Fell, the one who did the talking, only dressed like an old man. When he offered his hand, when he smiled, he was suddenly fifty years younger. And Mr. Crowley only dressed like a young man—or rather, he dressed the way that young men had dressed sometime around 1986. Close to, he had a hatchet-faced glower that added fifty years. What the two saw in each other, or the town, didn’t bear thinking about.

The neighbors had to notice all this several times over, because every single morning for five days running, they would forget the existence of the pair of them entirely.

——

“You’re doing it _again_.”

“Wh—yes, yes, fine. Yes, I am.”

“You’ve been doing it since we got here! We’ve been _over_ this. The entire _point_ —”

“I’ll stop, I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” said Crowley. “But, look. Can I stop next week? Work up to it?”

Aziraphale took his hand.

“You can’t work up to being a person,” he said, not unkindly. “No one can.”

“ _We_ can.”

“We already have. We have taken more time to do it than anyone else ever has or ever will.”

Crowley looked at the hand he was holding, and remembered how long it had taken to imagine doing that, how long it had taken them to dare; and he knew, also, that he had always done everything Aziraphale asked of him, every idiot thing, and always would.

“All right,” he said. “But you’re answering the bloody door. Every time.”

——

“What’s the plan?” Crowley had asked, several months earlier.

And after thinking it over, his hands steepled in front of his face, Aziraphale said,

“We have been terrible people. That is to say—we have been terrible at being people.”

Crowley put down his phone.

“Of course we have,” he said eventually. “That’s because we _aren’t_ people. We’re not—”

“We had better be,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve given it a great deal of thought. What you said, I mean. _Us against them_. When that day comes, Crowley, which are we? And how will anyone else know it? How will they trust us, you and I? How will they understand what’s at stake? How can we be _of_ them?”

Crowley hesitated.

“Sorry,” he said “are we still talking about real estate?”

“Yes, actually,” said Aziraphale. “Yes, we are. We have to have neighbors. That is, we have to _be_ neighbors. We have to belong somewhere. With other people, who’ll remember us, who’ll know us, when there’s another war, or even before that, if everything— And after all this time, all this soot and noise and all these _fronts_ , I’d … I’d like to be near the ocean. Wouldn’t you? Or don’t you like the seaside? I thought you did.”

Crowley thought of everywhere he’d gone by sea that Aziraphale couldn’t come, of how beautiful it had been, that vanished world.

“Sure, right,” he said, “fine. Anywhere you want. Just don’t see how you think we’ll save the world by retiring.”

“We are not,” said Aziraphale emphatically. “We are going to have a great deal of work to do.”

——

Crowley, as a proof of concept, bought a shirt.

It was not a good shirt. It was not tailored, it was not fitted, and it matched nothing, except insofar as it was black. It was not even from a clothing store; it came from a tourist shop. He bought it with money, actual money that had originated in a mint. The teenager behind the counter would remember him later, because he was handsome, because there were no sticky children following him, and because it wasn’t really bright enough for sunglasses.

Crowley could feel the girl remembering him this way, and he loathed it. But that was all right. He was practicing being an ordinary person. He was _humaning_. That was the point. If he could submit to it long enough to stand in line, to buy an object, to leave a shop and let the bell ring behind him like anyone else, then he could begin to learn how to do whatever it was Aziraphale thought they could do with that.

He never did wear the shirt. It said HEAVEN DOESN’T WANT ME AND HELL’S AFRAID I’LL TAKE OVER. That had become unfunny the moment that he had put it down on the counter. But this purchase, too, was human.

——

“Do you remember Doggerland?”

“What?” said Aziraphale.

“Doggerland. Out this way.” Crowley waved his arm toward the sea. The pair of them were walking along the crescent trail of the road, past their neighbors’ homes, towards where they could see a distant triangle of sea.

“It was all valleys and meadows and forests out there once,” Crowley went on. “Mammoths. Lots of tribesmen, coming and going. Plenty to eat. Then it all flooded over. Five thousand—six thousand years ago, I think? Not _the_ Flood, of course. Just _a_ flood, from up north. A slow one. All the tribes were chased out to the high ground. Don’t think anyone died. But the country died. The names they had for it. The names they had for themselves. All of it gone. Do you remember?”

“No,” said Aziraphale. “Nor do you. You weren’t there. Neither of us were.”

“Well, no, but—”

“If you were, you’d have told me. You always did. This was in a documentary you were watching, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Crowley. “Just, er. Just seemed like something you might know about, if anyone did.”

Aziraphale smiled. Since he had moved, he was dressing less—not less like himself, just _less_ , without a heavy coat or jacket or waistcoat. Crowley had persuaded him to settle for sleeveless jumpers over his shirts.[†]

They walked onward, through the grass at the roadside. Crowley felt the angel take his hand.

“We were in the Euphrates Valley all that time,” Aziraphale said. “I remember. Whenever you were gone for very long, you’d come back and you’d tell me what a fool I was for not being wherever it was that you’d been. I used to think, if you’d asked—”

There was a certain pressure in his palm that meant there was something soft that he desperately wanted to say.

“If I’d asked what?”

“If you’d asked me to come with you—I mean, really come away, somewhere else—”

“You’d have said no,” said Crowley. “You’d have _shouted_.”

“Yes. Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Aziraphale. “But I would think about it. Every time. I still wished—"

He was blushing now, fixing his eyes on the road ahead of them. Crowley wound himself a little closer, then looked around to see if anyone was near.

The problem was that there was.

“Oh, hello,” said Aziraphale brightly, and pulled himself forward.

Crowley groaned. He vaguely recognized the woman who was jogging towards them, or maybe he recognized the type of her: blondish-brownish hair, a business sort of ponytail, a crisp Lycra outfit. He could imagine the lives of her children, her husband, the sort of job she would have, the kind of name she would have. If he had wanted her name, he could reach inside her head and pluck it out.

But Aziraphale had done that already, simply by asking.

“… only this past week, and moving is dreadful, we haven’t met any of the neighbors, _have_ _we_ , Anthony? Come here. This is Anthony Crowley, and this young lady lives just across from us, I’m terribly sorry, you _just_ told me your name, it’s Kelly, isn’t it?”

In the centuries since the handshake had overtaken the polite bow and the raised right hand, Crowley had shaken the hands of thousands of people. He’d done it because he intended to charm them, or to trick them, or to lead them, or to learn about whatever art or music or dark little clubs they could show him.

Now, for the first time in his memory, he reached out to take a human being’s hand because that was what humans did: take each other’s hands and say hello. And it was, for the first time in his memory, terrifying.

And then it wasn’t. There was just a human in front of him, squinting in the sun, with an ordinary sweaty hand in his.

“Kelly,” he said, dragging each word from the depths, “of course. I’m sure I’ll remember.”

[*] Technically, it was only sparkling wine, since it did not come from the Champagne region of France. It had been terrorized by Crowley into its current form only a few minutes earlier, before which it had been a Sauvignon Blanc from Tesco.

[†] In many otherwise trustworthy partnerships, contentious items of clothing may be surreptitiously hidden. Aziraphale was under the impression that he had lost several bowties and pairs of argyle socks during his move. They had, in fact, been banished to the outer darkness.


End file.
